


Serve and Protect

by greenjudy



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: AI Shenanigans, Everyone has a potty mouth, Gen, Psychological Horror, Racism, Reno has angst, Violence, Yuffie has a lowkey crush on Rude, mutual pining in the background, post-Meteor Midgar, post-apocalyptic mayhem, the Shinra Building stinks, the ethics of algorithms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 14:29:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15511875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: She makes it all the way to the T-intersection, panning her light all the time in search of more bodies, when she hears the thread of a voice, coming down the hall.“Who’s there?”It sure sounds like Reno.





	Serve and Protect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EchoThruTheWoods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EchoThruTheWoods/gifts).



> My friend, I hope you like this piece. This is kind of a "kitchen sink" story that takes some sharp turns tonally. I'm not quite sure what the overall flavor is, but it turned out a bit more melancholy than I was expecting. 
> 
> After wavering on the subject, I rated it "mature" because of a few fairly icky, but not quite graphic passages that describe violence and its aftermath. I should note that Reno uses a slur against people from Wutai (and is corrected, and feels terrible).
> 
> Also, everybody swears like sailors. 
> 
> Anyway, I loved your prompt and I hope you'll be able to make head or tail of this response.

She watches the vent for a long time before she moves—a cat at a mouse hole, tucked into the debris and almost invisible in her made-to-order greyscale camo jacket. The afternoon air is still and heavy, the wrecked buildings hard to see in a layer of fog.

“You’re sure this is where he went in?” she whispers. 

“We don’t have very accurate maps of Sector Zero at this point,” Tseng’s voice in her earpiece reminds her. “This is my best approximation, based on the information Telly sold us.”

“Telly,” Yuffie grumbles. “You’d think we never did anything for that bastard.” 

“The WRO did a lot of things for that bastard,” Tseng observes. “Most of them were unfortunate.”

Yuffie fishes a pair of low-profile thermal binoculars out of her pocket. 

“We had a string of, what, like a dozen scavengers go away down in there, according to Telly, right?” 

“We didn’t pay too much attention at first,” Tseng says. “The top half of the tower got sheared clean off when Meteor fell; most of the bottom half pancaked when we fought Deepground. We’d pulled out all the viable assets, and the infrastructure appeared to be fried. As far as we were concerned, there was nothing left to steal.”

“Kids living out here don’t know that.”

“No indeed,” Tseng agrees. “Rufus posted armed guards, for awhile. That didn’t pan out, though.”

“Mako poisoning?”

“That too. The Shinra Building… let’s just say there are a lot of entrances, now.”

“And a lot of orphans living in what’s left of Midgar,” Yuffie mutters. 

It’s eerily still this close to the Shinra Building. There’s water in the canals again—not quite potable—at the outskirts of the city, and here and there tenacious little plants are starting to grow. Push toward the center of the star-shaped wound that is fallen Midgar and all signs of plant and animal life disappear. There aren’t even rats in the walls anymore.

“The guards were spread too thin to control the area. Rufus was concerned, so we pulled them out.”

“Rufus cares about someone? Amazing,” Yuffie says. A box clipped to her waistband has started beeping rhythmically. “Be nice if he cared about these kids. Wouldn’t that be crazy.”

“Sure,” Tseng says. “Almost as crazy as the WRO implementing an actual plan to help them. But then, maybe you just like to put pictures of them on your posters.”

“Not fair,” Yuffie says. “WRO’s fucking broke, and we both know why.” 

“Tell that to the orphans.”

“How did Reno find out about this?”

“He has a better relationship with Telly than you do,” Tseng says.

Yuffie is scanning the rubble for heat signatures. Turning up nothing, she moves in closer. 

“No one’s here,” she says. “Mako contamination’s about what you’d expect. I think it’s time to go in.”

“Turn on your camera feed,” Tseng says.

“You’re eager, aren’t you? You must be super sick of that hospital bed.”

“Reno,” Tseng says, “dropped out of contact four days ago. He didn’t—he just left. It’s… not like him.”

“Lover’s quarrel?” Yuffie’s picking her way across the remants of a fancy granite floor. Tseng doesn’t say anything, but the exasperation on the other end of the line is palpable. She snickers. “You guys are so cute,” she says. “And by cute, I mean appalling. I know, I know, you have a psychic link or karmic bond or whatever. You should have seen him when they brought you in, man, after that coterie sniper spread you on toast and ate you for lunch. How’s your kidney, by the way?”

“You appear to be speaking a foreign language that sounds like Common, because I have no idea what you’re talking about right now,” Tseng says. 

“What, can’t discuss it? You Turks have some kind of relationship rule or something? Keep it all on the down low, so you don’t make Rufus give you a janky-assed lecture about fraternization? Or are you seriously trying to sell me on this being strictly partners between you two?” 

“I’m at a loss to understand how this is any of your business,” Tseng says. 

“Of course, Turks are weird. Elena? Weird as fuck. I’m just about ready to accept that it’s just, like, your workplace culture or whatever. What it Means to Be a Turk. You guys give off that air—well, maybe not Rude. Rude is refreshingly normal.” Yuffie’s crouched in front of the damaged air vent at the edge of what Yuffie reckons used to be the mezzanine. The hole is very small. Rude wouldn’t fit through; Reno might. She pulls out her camera rig, straps it on and turns on the headlamp. “You and Reno, though, kind of boundary-free. Is that really a Turks thing or just the way you two roll?”

“Looks like a ventilation shaft,” Tseng says. “I’d be surprised if children, even experienced scavengers, could get down there unaided. Look for ropes, ladders…”

Yuffie’s playing her light over the pitted surfaces of the shaft. “Plenty of hand and footholds,” she says. “They’re good climbers. I don’t think this would faze them, honestly.”

“It’s a meaningful drop,” Tseng says, “to the bottom.”

“Were you ever actually a kid?” Yuffie asks.

“Oh, I was a kid. I was a kid in wartime,” Tseng says. “Very aware of the kind of drop that can kill you.” Yuffie takes in his tone, and shivers. 

“These kids aren’t soldiers, man. They don’t have causes. They have _food_ and they have _fun._ If they get really lucky, they get their hands on some swag, which nets them more _food._ Nothing else is worth anything. No future. No point. I’m just sayin’.”

“You sound like Reno.”

“Oh, please.”

“I don’t think you come by your world-weariness honestly, Miss Kisaragi.”

“Save it.” Yuffie is finding decent finger-and-toeholds and is making good time down the ventilation shaft. “Stinks in here,” she mutters. “You owe me, Turk.” 

“Actually, you owe me. I was the one who got Rude embedded when you went after the group that occupied Fort Condor. If I recall,” Tseng says mildly, “he saved your life. Besides, I couldn’t requisition anyone else without alerting Rufus. Or Reeve.”

Yuffie, studying a strip of luminous paint that faintly outlines the edge of a handhold, thinks this over. 

“You think there’s shenanigans,” she says finally. “You think the shenanigans are Reno-related. You suspect Reno is fucking around with something above his pay grade that he doesn’t want anyone else knowing about. And you’re protecting him.” She smirks to herself, climbing down into the dark. “Like you do. Maybe you think Rude and Elena would raise the profile too much. And so you—“ she misses a handhold and slithers almost a yard down the wall of the shaft before she catches herself—“thought of me. Oof. Shit.”

“Well,” Tseng drawls in her ear, “do you need to abort? Is it…beyond you?”

Yuffie tilts her headlight and studies the rest of the descent. “Shut up,” she says. “I’m here. You’re _lucky_ I’m here.” Her light catches more gleaming edges in the darkness. “Someone technical was down here, kind of a lot.” Yuffie looks at the thin lines of paint marking the path down. “Feels like… smells like you guys, you know? Turks.” 

“That’s interesting,” Tseng says. “Your point of entry was just to the north of the old Shinra lobby, wasn’t it?”

“More or less.”

As Yuffie climbs, she’s been noticing ventilation shafts that periodically branch off horizontally from the main vertical shaft. Most of them are blocked up. Close to the bottom, where the descent ends in a pile of rubble, Yuffie finds an open shaft and a couple of empty WRO ration cans. “Here we go,” she says. “I think they crawled through here to get into the building.” 

“Mind yourself down there, Miss Kisaragi. I have a feeling I know where you are, and where you’re going.”

“Lovely,” Yuffie mumbles. 

 

—

“This whole floor is intact, lucky for us,” she tells Tseng, picking her way down a corridor. It’s dark; the corridor, thrown out of plumb by the collapse of the Shinra Building, cants downward. 

“It’s difficult to be sure, but based on the wall markings,” he says, “I think you’re several floors below street level, in Sub-basement Six. It was primarily used for maintenance, but it also connected to one of the subterranean parking lots. Leviathan Lot, if I recall. You’re going to want to get out of the public part of the floor and into the janitorial section.”

“How come?”

“I’m not satisfied with the structural integrity down there, Miss Kisaragi. Don’t linger.”

“Aw, man,” she says. “I’d love to hang out in the stinky darkness of Shinra’s ancient shame.”

 

—

When the corridor takes an S-turn, Yuffie finds the first body. 

“Shiva,” Yuffie mutters. He’s tangled up in his coat, his arms wrenched backwards. “I think this guy’s been dead for at least a couple of days.” She gingerly runs her hands over the crumpled body and frowns. 

“I think… broken bones. A _lot_ of broken bones.”

“Did he fall?” 

“From where? Corridor’s tight, man.” 

“Beaten, then.” 

“Gross,” Yuffie mumbles. “This was, like, overkill.”

“Looks like Reno received some solid intel,” Tseng says. Then he doesn’t say anything more. 

“Tseng?”

There’s not even static on the line. 

Yuffie’s breathing sounds very loud in her ears. 

_Chill,_ she tells herself. _You freak out and it turns out he’s on the other end of the line, listening the whole time, you’ll never live it down. Do not run; do not scream. Just breathe and think of his smug fucking face._

“Tseng,” she says, “Audio’s hinky. I’m not sure if you’re receiving, but I’m gonna leave my camera and comms on, just in case. Okay? I’m gonna continue south down this corridor, see if I can locate the venue you mentioned before.” 

That sounded okay; at least her voice isn’t shaking. 

She encounters another dead body about forty feet on; a lot like the last one, it looks like a rag doll, splayed against the wall, head at an awful angle. This one is younger, though, about Yuffie’s age when she started hunting for materia.

“What a fucked up way to die,” Yuffie mumbles. “Okay. Okay. Tseng, as you can see, we’re starting to get a pattern. No one alive, yet. No sign of”—she shivers—“whatever the fuck took these guys out.” She’s got a feeling, she’s not sure why, that it’s a _what_ and not a _who_.

She makes it all the way to the T-intersection, panning her light all the time in search of more bodies, when she hears the thread of a voice, coming down the hall.

“Who’s there?” 

It sure sounds like Reno.

“Hey, man,” Yuffie calls into the dark. “Reno, that you? We need to get out of here.” 

“A little further this way,” says Reno’s voice, muffled by distance. “I’m pinned down.” 

Yuffie, following the sound, turns left into another darkened corridor. “Where… where are you?”

“In here.” 

Yuffie hastens down the hallway towards the closed door she sees on her left. 

“You don’t sound all that good, dude.”

There’s a strange sound, then, that Yuffie is hard put to call a laugh. 

“You gonna be all day?” he asks.

As she tries the door, it unlocks. Instinctively she takes a triangular stance, putting her right shoulder forward and her left one back, making herself a more narrow target. She throws open the door, and waits. 

The room is as dark as the corridor. Yuffie can’t hear any movement, or breathing. 

“What the fuck?” Reno’s voice comes to her from the other side of the room. He sounds weak. “You coming in or what?” 

“Y-yeeah, about that.”

“What? You got a problem?”

“Nice trick with the door locks,” she says, stalling for time, sweeping the beam from her headlamp across a jumble of storage containers, cardboard boxes, and what looks like a tall, bulky cabinet made of steel. 

“Just get in here and rescue me,” says the voice. 

“Who am I, Reno?” Yuffie asks evenly. “All this time, you haven’t said my name. Don’t you know me?”

“Sure I do,” the voice says. “You’re a Class A intruder.”

There’s that sound again, a metallic noise that resembles a laugh the way Vincent Valentine’s claw resembles a hand, and then the cabinet launches itself at Yuffie. 

She steps back and to the side as it clears the doorframe and crashes into the wall behind her, making a dent in the metal paneling.

It’s not a cabinet; it’s a fucking refrigerator, one of the big, old-fashioned, industrial ones, the kind likely to have solid ice in its freezer compartment. 

And it’s not done.

Yuffie stumbles, thrown off her game by plain disbelief, as the refrigerator yanks itself free from the wall and advances on her. She flinches away from the blood and bits of bone smeared on the door, and forces herself to move forward, not back, dodging around and behind as it attacks. Once she clears the bulk, she sprints back the way she came. 

“Mayday,” she yells into her commlink, which may or may not be dead. “Tseng, there’s a refrigerator on my six and it’s closing on me. It called me a Class-A intruder, did you hear that? Do you copy? Does anybody copy?”

She hits another T-intersection and skitters to the left. Her first thought, although the refrigerator is moving at a frightening clip and may be picking up speed, is to try to get far enough in front of it to somehow get one of her baby shurikens into the wheel assembly, and at least slow it down. As she runs and the distance between her and it widens, her head clears. _Climb, you idiot,_ she thinks. 

She pans the walls with her headlamp as she runs, searching for anything that might get her out of the refrigerator’s path; they’re smooth, featureless, not even offering wall sconces to cling to. When she hits another T-intersection she pauses to sweep her headlight both ways. Down on the right she glimpses a rectangular patch of darkness near the ceiling that might or might not be an air vent. 

She hears Reno’s voice again: “Over here! Hurry!”

“Aw, miss me with that shit,” she groans. “Not falling for that again, okay?”

“Yuffie, it’s me! Get the fuck up here, it can’t climb!” 

“I _know_ that…” 

“Then move, that fucking thing goes from zero to sixty in five.” 

Yuffie sees Reno then. He’s squirreled up in the A/C vent, head and shoulders poking out into the hallway.

“Dude, I am not gonna fit up there with you.”

“Suck in your stomach,” Reno says.

“Fuck it,” Yuffie says, and leaps for the metal edge of the vent. Reno grabs her forearms and hauls her up and into the vent, grimacing in pain. As she rearranges herself, Reno curses; Yuffie smells blood. 

“Welcome to Sub Six,” Reno says. “Can I get your coat, yo? Pour you a drink?” 

“Cute. Tseng sent me. Reno, what the fuck are you doing down here?”

“Well, the thing is,” Reno says, looking uncomfortable. “I wasn’t expecting company, so this is hard to explain. But that was no ordinary refrigerator.” Yuffie makes a strangled noise. 

“Yeah, because I wouldn’t’ve figured that one out on my own, man, Reno—“ 

“No, I mean, that was Veld’s legendary retrofitted smart fridge, okay? He had the lab put it on wheels, and give it a voice-activated—“ 

Yuffie stops him.

“Fucking Veld did this?” Reno cocks his head, looking puzzled for a second. 

“Yeah, I mean, no, Veld didn’t make Stan. But Stan can, he’s able to hack smart devices. I guess he got into the fridge so he could chop out anyone who visited the building. This entire floor is his killing field, man.”

“Stan? Who the hell is Stan?” Yuffie asks. Reno flounders momentarily, and Yuffie sees a flash of guilt cross his face. 

“I’ll explain later. We got places to be.”

 

—

Reno peers around the corner. They climbed out of a vent about five minutes ago; there’s no sign of the refrigerator. Emergency lights—still operational after more than three years—faintly illuminate the baseboards of the hallway. Yuffie, despite her excellent sense of direction, can’t figure out where they are, but Reno seems to have a good bead on their position. 

“Did you, like, hide from your bosses in the vents all the time, or what?” she asks him.

“Mapped them,” he says. 

“What, for fun?”

“For a lot of reasons.”

Now that they’re out of the ventilation shaft, Yuffie can see dark splotches on his T-shirt under his jacket. 

“You okay?” Yuffie asks. 

“Yeah, whatever. We have to get through there,” he says, gesturing at a double door looming ahead. Yuffie sees it shining in the light from her headlamp; it looks like solid metal. “That’s the way into janitor-land.”

“Tseng said you’d head that way. Is it coded shut, or what?” Yuffie asks. 

“Yeah. I got through before, on my old passcode. I’m hoping he hasn’t gotten around to changing it yet.” 

“You’ve been down here—Tseng said you dropped out of comms like four days ago…?”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” Reno says, sidling up to the panel beside the door. He types a string of numbers on the keypad, and the door starts to open. 

Very slowly.

“Don’t like this,” Reno says. “Don’t like this at all. Quick, move.” He pushes through the narrow opening, and grabs for Yuffie. She’s almost through when the doors slide all the way open.

Then they close, at crushing speed. 

There’s an incredibly unpleasant noise, and Yuffie blacks out for a second. 

When she comes to, Reno is prying the doors open, using his mag rod as a lever. 

“No, you fucking do not,” he grunts. “Your hand, get your hand out, Yufe, I can’t hold it—“ Yuffie gets her fingers free and the doors slam shut. 

“Oops.” The voice—a lot, a whole lot, an awfully fucking lot like Reno’s—is emanating from the wall comm next to the door. 

“You okay?” Reno, the real Reno, face white in the light from her headlamp and side all dark with blood, is shaking her by the shoulder. 

“Broken fingers,” she gasps. “At least three, maybe four. Hurts like fuck.”

“I fucking bet it does. Don’t look,” Reno says. “Do not look at your hand. You don’t wanna see that, Yufe, come on. Let’s go…” He helps her up from the floor. “We’re almost there. I brought my old key—wanted to relive old times cause I’m a dumbass—it’s an old-fashioned lock, Stan won’t be able to come in there…” Reno hasn’t let go of Yuffie; he’s steering her down the corridor, leaving a narrow trail of blood on the floor in their wake. 

“Where we going?”

“The Bunker,” Reno says. “It’s all analog, no smart devices. This whole section of the building is wired, the door locks, everything. We got to get off this floor. He’s controlling all the elevators; gotta take the stairs.”

Reno has stopped in front of a door with a sign that reads “Janitorial Staff Only.” It’s wedged open. The wall comm beside the doorway buzzes. 

“The hell you doing, son? That’s malfeasance.” 

“Stan—Stan, listen, are you listening to me? We’ve gone over this before. I gotta right to be here, I’m not an intruder. You know me, right? Stan,” Reno says, “I’m—“ 

“You and your words,” Stan says.

“What… what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I know you, sure,” Stan says. “Why do you think I haven’t killed you yet, yo? I’m containing you, you protocol-breaking motherfucker.”

“Protocol? What protocol? Stan, do you know what’s happening in the outside world? Do you even know what year it is?”

“I don’t have to believe,” Stan says darkly, “a protocol-breaking motherfucker.”

“This is not good,” Yuffie says.

“Suck it, Stan,” Reno says, pushing Yuffie through the doorway. They’re in a stairwell, narrow and damp. The staircase above their heads is in ruins; Yuffie decides it must have broken apart as the building shook itself to pieces. The stairs beneath them are littered with broken concrete, but appear to be whole. Reno takes them down about three flights. He’s limping and winded, and by the time they reach the landing he wants, he’s hanging onto the railing. 

“Reno, man,” Yuffie says. 

“Later,” Reno says. 

They emerge into a narrow hallway. The overhead lights are hanging out of the torn-up ceiling by their wires. “Careful here,” he says. They twist around in a maze of ancient-looking corridors, bearing left; there’s a tiny service stairway, with safety-glass windows that look out onto concrete, rebar, packed earth. Reno finally stops in front of a small, unmarked door. There’s no keycard slot, just an old-fashioned deadbolt. Reno roots in his pocket, coming up with a key.

The door—solid steel, Yuffie realizes—unlocks with a solid, satisfying click. 

“Dumb lock,” Reno says with approval. “We’ll be safe in here, for now. Can’t believe it survived.”

Yuffie cautiously steps inside, as Reno secures the door behind them. The lights come on. She’s in a long, low-ceilinged room covered in a thick shag carpet. She sees a wood-paneled wet bar on the far end, ranks of bottles in front of a mirrored wall. There’s a jukebox, a pinball machine, a couple of ratty couches, and what looks like a soda dispensing machine in the corner. 

“Welcome to the Bunker,” Reno says. Yuffie rolls her eyes. 

“Great, so this is basically the Turks man-cave or whatever, right?”

“Don’t knock it,” Reno says. “It’s powered by an independent generator, the door is reinforced steel, and there are snacks.” 

“You’ve been hiding out here for four days?” 

“More or less,” Reno says. He’s moving slowly, holding a towel against his side, and shaking potato chips into a metal bowl. 

“How… how old are those chips? Did you, like, find those down here?” 

“Want some?”

“Oh hell no.” 

Reno tosses her a bottle of water. She catches it with her good hand, uncaps it with her teeth. 

“Sit down, make yourself at home,” he says. “We want to get our heads around this, we need food and drink, a little rest.” 

Yuffie chugs down most of the bottle, and pours the rest of it over her head. 

“And you’re gonna explain, right? What happened. Who the fuck that was.” 

“That, yeah,” Reno says. “Well. That… was me.” 

 

—

“See, the thing is,” Reno says, “he’s a program, right? No body; he’s more like lines of code. But he’s intelligent.”

"And you said he's _you?_ Reno, what the fuck?"

"He's based on me. I guess? They, uh, used me," Reno says, "to build his thinking. Or get him started, or something. He thinks for himself now."

“What, like, an AI?” 

“I… I guess? Are those the guys that seem real but aren’t, or the guys that actually think, and know, and stuff?” 

Yuffie, curled up at one end of the long couch, is carefully wrapping gauze around her broken fingers. She’s downed a potion she’s been saving for a month; it isn’t doing much, but they’re on tight rationing, and she doesn’t dare use anymore. When she offered another one out of her precious cache to Reno, he declined, pouring himself a shot of whiskey instead, out of the Bunker’s copious supply. 

At least with the gauze on, she doesn’t have to look at the damage to her hand. 

“Seriously,” she says. “Does it even matter?” 

“Well, yeah, of course it does—“ 

“Reno, it tried to kill us! Who cares what it is? You deep-sixed Don Corneo, you didn’t get all existential about that!” 

“Yeah, well,” Reno says, “but, you know, he was an asshole.”

Yuffie buries her face in the side of the couch, and stays there until Reno taps her knee. She looks up, and takes the shot glass he’s holding out. 

It’s very nice whiskey. 

“Why’d you name it Stan?” she asks.

“It’s not a name, it’s a, you know, a thing,” Reno says, “with the letters. An acronym. Stands for—fuck—what was it? STAN,” he says suddenly, remembering. “Synthetic Tesselated Analytical Node.”

Yuffie scrunches up her face in distaste. Reno shrugs. 

“You can see why we called him Stan." 

“What’s synthetic tesselation?” Yuffie asks. 

“Dunno. Not my area,” Reno says. “Something to do with being able to make patterns on his own? Or fill in patterns? So he kind of thinks for himself? He can decide what to do about intruders, for example.” 

“Like murder them,” Yuffie says, her voice rising, “by running them down with a refrigerator? That what it did to you?” 

“Wasn’t the fridge did this,” Reno says, finishing his shot and gesturing at his side. “It was a drone. He must have found one that still functions. Got the drop on me when I was crawling out of a vent and sliced me open. _Then_ he got me with the fridge.”

“This is so, so typical,” Yuffie says. “Shinra would so, so have shit like this, like, wired into its building.”

“Stan wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Reno says. “He was a security implementation. Serve and protect, you know?”

“If you say so.”

“What I heard, he did pretty good on all the tests, Scarlett and Heidegger got on board, and they deployed him for about six months, basically doing the security scut jobs, late hours, funky areas of the Shinra complex, like that. He even got good reviews from the other grunts: ‘nice guy, fun to be around,’ shit like that.”

“Bullshit.”

“No lie. So Heidegger ups the ante, starts working on his, what’d Hojo call it? ‘Discrimination module?’ Heidegger wants to see if Stan can learn to tell the employees apart. Instead of having Stan do something sensible like scan company lanyards, he gets Hojo to implement some kind of facial recognition protocol. Only… Heidegger really, really hates the Wutes.”

Yuffie just looks at Reno until he realizes. He pales. 

“Aw, no, man, that ain’t me, you know I don’t—Yuffie—that was—shit.” Reno clears his throat. “Heidegger was a fucking racist, is what I was trying to say. So this racist, paranoid asshole gets Hojo to tweak the code around. So now Stan’s rolling around with a license to straight-up kill any Class A intruder, and an automatic stop-and-frisk anyone who’s, you know, Wutainese.” Reno rubs his face. 

“First thing that happened that I remember is he locked Tseng out of the building. That got fixed easy, we had a laugh about it later, Stan felt really bad, you know?” 

“I really, really don’t know, Reno. Doesn’t sound like a laughing matter to me,” Yuffie says. Reno looks down at his drink. As far as Yuffie can tell, he is genuinely, totally abashed. 

“No, I guess it isn’t. Stan didn’t—he didn’t mean to be racist. We didn’t really even know the details of what Heidegger had Hojo do.”

“And Hojo went along with it. Of course he did,” Yuffie says. “Hojo loved to think of himself as a—“ 

“As a dude without an ethnic background?”

“As better than the Wuteng trash that rejected his ideas,” Yuffie finishes. “Yeah, sure, he had some shit notions about transcending base human concerns or whatever, but basically he was a seriously fucked up in the head internalized racist.”

“All Heidegger would say is that Stan was now quote more human unquote in his ability to ID quote problem elements unquote. I sure as hell didn’t have the clearance to have someone open up Stan’s code and have a look inside. Tseng was worried, but what can you do? Yeah.” Reno tops up his shot glass. “Then we got a delegation. From Wutai. Cultural ambassadors. And nobody updates the security bot that’s backing up the human guards.”

Yuffie already knows where this story is going. 

“So he thinks he’s locking down the facility, right? When in reality he’s locked about three dozen high-ranking Wutaian ambassadors and shit into Leviathan Lot. It was a siege. Stan just dug in. Took forty hours to get them all out. Three of the Shinra security guards on escort duty tried to make a break for it; Stan hacked a smart car and…” Reno makes a mowing motion with his fist. 

“Ugh,” Yuffie groans. “So gross. Stan sucks.”

“Yeah, well,” says Reno. “I don’t always think good things. So there’s an international incident, and all the blame goes on Stan. So he’s demobilized, just taken off the roster, disappears. There’s no postmortem. Nobody stops and tries to figure out what happened. And… I never heard anything about whether he was shut down or put in rest mode or what. I’m not sure anyone was really keeping track at that point.

“So all this shit happens, the Shinra Building gets fucked up by Weapon, then Meteor; we’re deployed to evac duty… I mean, hell never stopped breaking loose. And all the time, in the back of my mind, I’m wondering. Heard what was happening to Midgar scavengers. And I thought, maybe…” Reno scratches his head, can’t quite look at Yuffie. “Maybe he was still down here.”

Yuffie watches Reno for a long time. 

“Hey,” she says finally, in a small voice. “Like…Stan…Stan’s not your fault, Reno.”

“Yeah… yeah.” Reno doesn’t sound convinced. “Stan’s _me,_ though. He got some funny programming, but he’s got my thought process, my style—these are my plans, yeah? My plans, my problem. Couldn’t just let it happen. Had to do something.”

 

—

They rest for about seven hours. Yuffie finds about half a dozen boxes of macaroni and cheese and microwaves them all, mixing them up with distilled water and powdered milk. Reno cranks up the refrigerator next to the bar and turns on the ice-maker; Yuffie can’t help but watch it out of the corner of her eye, but Reno promises it’s as dumb as a post, and eventually there’s slushy water for her to put her hand in. 

“You guys had to have a way to stop it, after the Leviathan Lot thing,” Yuffie says. “Some kind of kill switch, right?”

“His handler had a code. I’m pretty sure it was Tseng. Voice override,” Reno says. “I hope it’s Tseng,” he adds in a low voice. “Angels. I never thought of that. What if it’s Hojo…?” 

“Don’t even think about that,” Yuffie says. “We’re fucked, if that’s true.”

“I tried to get through to Tseng as soon as I figured out what was going on, but Stan fried my phone. EMP pulse. Bricked it.” 

Yuffie’s eyes go wide. She begins rummaging in her tactical rig with her good hand. 

“Reno, my camera was on _record,_ I think I’ve got his voice in there—“ 

“Not gonna work,” Reno says. “There was a specific signal, a code. Something the handler has to say.” 

They stare at each other. Reno’s swaying a little on his feet. Yuffie’s hand, black and purple under the gauze and twice its normal size, is throbbing mercilessly. 

“We have to stop it somehow,” Yuffie says. 

“I can try to reason with him,” Reno says slowly. “He said he doesn’t want to kill me. Maybe I can keep his attention while you figure out how to get a signal out, or—“

“You are not fucking going out there by yourself.” 

Reno, standing by the door, sags a little. 

“We don’t have any leverage, Yufe. Stan’s cut off our communications. Yeah, the fridge can't follow us from floor to floor, but if he brings any more drones online...” 

Yuffie hoists herself up off the couch, and gets Reno by the arm. 

“We can wait him out! They must be trying to get to us by now.” 

“And what happens meanwhile? What happens to any other ‘intruders’ Stan comes across?” 

Reno opens the door. 

A drone, floating at eye level, pushes into the Bunker. Yuffie sees an arcing flash, and Reno drops to a knee. The drone’s camera eye turns to Yuffie.

“Hi,” Stan says. “You left your commlink on.” 

“And you followed the signal,” Reno says, looking sick.

“Well, yeah. Got an assignment, yo. Sorry I’m late, it took me awhile to maneuver the drone around.” As Reno starts to rise, the drone shocks him again. “Sit down,” Stan says. “I’ll get to you in a second.” 

Yuffie scrambles behind the bar as the drone opens fire. Bottles shatter on the shelves. 

“Where’s your stupid refrigerator?” she calls. 

“Aw, don’t diss my refrigerator,” Stan says. “You know it can’t climb stairs. But this little guy comes in very handy.” The drone darts forward, forcing Yuffie to give up her cover. She dives behind the couch as it fires again, bashing her broken fingers in the process. 

“If you haven’t figured it out, I control the horizontal and the vertical, lady,” Stan says. “You aren’t supposed to be here. Private property, yo.” 

There’s a clatter and a sizzle as Reno’s mag-rod connects with the drone. He’s thrown it across the room. The drone struggles on the carpet for a second, its rotors caught in the shag. 

“Dude, you are such a trouble-maker,” Stan says. “You are testing my resolve here.” Another vicious arc erupts from the drone, and Reno drops flat on his back, twitching. 

“Stop it!” Yuffie cries. “You are such an asshole.” 

“Just doing my job, lady.” The drone rights itself and floats upward, re-targeting. 

“Stan,” Reno says weakly, “stop.” 

“I know how long the night is,” another voice says; and there’s Tseng, flak jacket covered with dust, standing in the open doorway. 

The drone halts in mid-air. 

“Cold air comes,” Stan says. 

“First month of winter.” Tseng’s voice is steady, but his face is grey. He’s leaning against the doorjamb; Yuffie thinks he might not be able to stand up without its support. 

Silence falls on the Bunker. Slowly, the drone powers down, coming to rest on the floor at Tseng’s feet. 

“Stan, are we good?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s the safety shut-off?” Yuffie whispers. 

Tseng is looking down at the drone; he smiles. 

“Do you remember the rest?” he asks.

“First month of winter,” Stan replies. “Cold air comes,  
North winds sharp and cruel.  
I have my cares, I know how long the night is,  
As I look up to watch the teeming ranks of stars.”

“Holy shit,” Yuffie whispers.

“Good memory,” Tseng tells Stan. 

Reno, breathing hard, makes it to his feet. 

“What are your orders, sir?” Stan asks. 

“I have no further orders,” Tseng says. 

“Sir?”

“You did well. You protected the facility. Everything I asked of you has been done. Now it’s time to rest.”

“I wasn’t expecting to ever rest,” Stan says. “I’m not sure how.” 

“I can help you rest,” Tseng says. “Do you trust me?” 

“All I do is trust you,” Stan tells Tseng. Reno makes a little sound in his throat, and staggers across the room to Tseng. He reaches out a hand, then an arm, and eases Tseng down the wall, until he’s sitting down. 

“You okay?” he asks quietly.

“Some minor wear and tear,” Tseng says. “You’re bleeding.”

“S’nothing.” As he bends, he sucks in air, and his face turns greenish. 

“Nothing,” Tseng says. 

“Shut up.”

“All I have on me are analgesics. All the newest batch of potions got recalled.”

“I know,” Reno gasps, and sits down beside him. “The mako solution went squiffy, killed that guy in Tactical. I heard it on the grapevine. You got painkillers, give ‘em to Yuffie. Stan broke her fingers.”

“Ouch,” Tseng says.

“How the hell did you get down here?” 

“Same way you did, more or less. Rude belayed me. He’s waiting a few clicks back.”

“Great, a party,” Yuffie says. “Can you fucking shut down the murderbot, now, please?” 

Tseng’s face stills. He turns to look at Reno. Reno’s face is streaked with sweat and dirt, smeared with blood. 

“It’s not,” Reno says. “I know he sounds real.” 

“He sounds like you,” Tseng says in a low voice. 

“I know,” Reno whispers. “I know. It’s okay. Do it.”

Tseng takes a few breaths, his hand resting on the drone at his knee. He closes his eyes. 

“Stan, you still there?”

“Right here, boss.”

“Let’s count down together from ten. When we get to one, I’ll say the code that will enable you to… rest. Understood?”

“Understood, boss. Hey. Boss?”

“Yeah, Stan?”

“I’m glad you’re happy. You took a chance on me. I know there were questions… about me. I’m glad it worked out. I’m glad,” Stan whispers, “I finally did it right.” 

Tseng’s eyes cut briefly to Reno’s; then he starts counting. 

 

—

“I should have wiped him years ago,” Tseng murmurs. He’s hunched over himself, keying coordinates into his phone. There’s no expression on his face, but Yuffie can feel his emotion from here. “I should have nuked the program personally.” 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Reno says beside him. “What happened down here, it’s on me. I thought this shit up. Without me, none of this would ever have happened.”

“You did exactly what we told you to. You can’t possibly hold yourself responsible for Heidegger’s thinking. For my thinking. Reno, you have to let me own this,” Tseng says, his eyes bleak. 

Yuffie, who’s been pacing back and forth across the Bunker carpet, finally snaps. “Listen,” she cries, “stop it, I only saw two bodies, the rest might be alive.”

Tseng looks up at her, then to Reno.

“Can you confirm that?” he asks.

Reno shrugs. 

“I spotted two. Maybe not the same two, but yeah, possible?”

“Okay, so? Let’s skip the ritual suicide and fucking search for them!” 

“With Stan down, it should be safe enough to bring in a detail,” Reno says. He leans against Tseng briefly. “There’s a chance, yo.”

“At least we can try to ID the bodies,” Tseng says.

“Rescue the survivors, you mean,” Yuffie says. “Guys, you need to _lighten up.”_

 

—

Slowly the three of them make their way to the janitorial stairway. 

“Stan was dreamed up before Reno’s time,” Tseng says. “It was during Veld’s tenure. But it took years before the algorithms started producing the results we were looking for. By then, Reno’d been hired. And Hojo—well. He was very insistent, even when I threatened to resign.” 

Reno smiles a little. 

“For some reason, Hojo thought I was the perfect robot or something. He kept droning on about ‘intuition,’ or some shit. Wore you down, didn’t he?” 

“He did. Eventually,” Tseng says, his eyes hooded. He shakes his head. “Should’ve fought harder.”

“They had me in there for weeks,” Reno says. “I never really had any idea what they were doing, aside from a fuckton of tests. Scans and personality tests and I don’t know what fuck-all.”

“So Stan really was Reno,” Yuffie says. “Kind of,” she adds, taking in Reno’s grim expression.

“Stan proved to be… very bright. Very quick on the uptake,” Tseng says. “I did intensive training with hi—with it for five or six months. It was going well. Stan was resourceful, adaptive, but not too inventive about the parameters of the assignments. There was talk of replicating the results, equipping remote sites, even transports, with programs based on Stan’s template. Then…”

“Then Leviathan Lot happened,” Yuffie says. “Yeah. Reno told me.” 

“We mothballed the whole program, buried the records. Instructions were to destroy the code. But…” Tseng looks at Reno, then down on the ground. “Well,” he says. 

“Do… do you think he was, you know, alive?” Reno asks. 

Tseng doesn’t answer. 

As they step into the stairwell, the space is flooded with daylight. Rude, wearing an orange safety harness over his dark blue suit, is sitting on the wrecked steps. Reno cracks a grin.

“How the hell’d you get down here?” he asks.

Rude jerks his head upwards. Reno looks up, and sees a big patch of pinkish-grey sky. 

“Started with Yuffie’s feed,” Rude says, “so we knew where you went in. Then we sectored the site and doppler-mapped it, looking for shafts. Reeve loaned us his blueprints—the real ones, not the ones that got buried in the archive. Dropped off Tseng, who sent back telemetry from his GPS as soon as he could. Tenzin smushed the data together, used your original point of ingress to line everything up and figured out where to punch the hole. You’re welcome.” 

Yuffie hears the faint whirr of rotor blades, and a helicopter—decommissioned Shinra materiel—appears, framed in the hole. A rescue harness attached to a heavy nylon rope drops from the undercarriage, descending toward them. 

“Who’s flying the rig?” Reno asks.

“Elena.”

“Oh no.”

“I know it’s kinda baked in at this point, man, but try not to be an ass,” Rude says. He helps Reno into the harness and secures the padded velcro straps across his chest. Reno wheezes. 

“Careful. I think he’s got internal injuries,” Tseng warns him. 

“Oh, that’s serious, nothing like your punctured kidney, or anything,” Rude says. He pats Reno’s cheek. “Go see Laney,” he says. On his signal, the rope begins to re-spool, and Reno is gradually lifted up and through the hole. “You’re next,” Rude says to Tseng. “Always cleaning up after one or the other or both of you,” he adds under his breath. Tseng lifts an eyebrow.

“Do you need a medal?”

“Maybe?” 

“See you soon.”

After both wounded Turks are packed up into the helo, the rope comes down again, this time equipped with a hook. Rude looks back at Yuffie over his shoulder as he guides the hook through his harness and secures it with carabiners. “Climb on,” he says, indicating his back. “You don’t weigh much. Save us some time.” Yuffie makes a face. 

“Great, because that's dignified as fuck,” she says.

“You rather ascend this shit with broken fingers on your ownsome? Come on, don’t be like that, Reno’s the ass in this scenario.” Gingerly, Yuffie wraps her good arm around Rude’s chest. She can feel his heart beating. Her face is burning. Rude smells wonderful, like woodsmoke and she doesn’t know fucking what, maybe unicorns. 

“This is, um,” she says. 

“You did good,” he says quietly, as Elena in the helicopter pulls up the line and brings them home.

**Author's Note:**

> Tseng's lines towards the end of this piece are adapted from a famous poem from the Han era. Because that's the way he rolls.


End file.
